YMMV / Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction

• Abridged Arena Array: Single-player variation — Despite there being six different kinds of field effects to work with, the game favors starting the player in the Yami field due to the Shadow Duels employed by the antagonists, even if their Deck is better suited for a different field. The only other opponents that start with any other field effect are Rex, Mai, Mako, Espa Roba, and Weevil.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Shadi and Ishizu claim Pegasus was unknowingly possessed by Reshef, but Pegasus himself says that he let Reshef into his heart. Which is correct is up to the player.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • Relatively speaking given the game's difficulty, Bandit Keith. A full third of his deck is made up of tribute monsters, and that rises to half his deck when you include his Spell cards that only work on one of his tribute monsters, thus it's very possible for him to end up with a dead hand full of monsters he can't summon. His non-tribute monsters are mostly Fiend-attribute save for the Fire-attribute Blast Sphere, so a couple of Light monsters can quash them easily. Or you can just use Umi to change the field to Ocean, giving his Machine monsters a 30% penalty to their stats or use Stain Storm to destroy his machines. All in all he's not too much tougher than most of the Ghouls you faced before getting to him. And for the ultimate insult, if he gets three Tributes he will use them to summon The Winged Dragon of Ra against you... but it's got 0/0 stats since he doesn't know how to release its Battle Mode.
  • Kaiba. Even though he's the second of two boss fights, he isn't that hard, as his strong tribute monsters tend to clog up his hand often and, like Bandit Keith, you can use Umi to power down his machines or play Stain Storm to destroy them.
• Awesome Music:
  • The music when dueling Pegasus's lackeys, as well as the Millennium Guardian theme.
  • The theme for Pegasus's castle.
  • Dark Mokuba's theme. It's only played once, so enjoy it as long as you can.
  • The Paradox Brothers' theme.
  • The music when dueling a high-ranked Ghoul.
  • "Ishizu's Request," where she sends the characters on their mission.
  • "Pegasus's Awakening" starts out tense and quickly turns sad.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment:
  • The Kaibaland plot, though it overlaps with a Heartwarming Moment as Serenity is super happy to see it.
  • The optional sidequest where everyone thinks Tristan/Honda has turned into a robot monkey.
  • Another optional moment where Téa gets hit on by Johnny Steps and the penguin-themed member of the Big Five. This is because of a fortune-teller saying she'd have bad luck with men.
• Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: Reshef of Destruction - Actually Tolerable Mod is considered a massive improvement on the base game. It removes a lot of the Scrappy Mechanics such as the cursor freaking out every time a move is made and Life Points not restoring themselves after a duel, made the deck capacity and money rewards from duelist much more reasonable, and made the prices for selling cards much better, making it much easier to get better cards for your deck. Many will tell people to play this version over the base game if they want to experience the game's story.
• Contested Sequel: Given that The Sacred Cards was very easy to the point of It's Easy, So It Sucks!, some consider Reshef's intense difficulty spike to be an improvement, others cite it as Fake Difficulty by way of The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard. The card pool is larger and the gameplay more complex than The Sacred Cards, which allows for more intricate strategies while still capturing some Early-Installment Weirdness, but the changes are also the source of the game's main Scrappy Mechanics and many of the more interesting cards are at a high-enough level that you probably won't get to use them for most of the game. The story, too, tends to drive a wedge through people, with some calling it better for taking advantage of the universe of the series and featuring some neat twists and turns, and others labeling it a bad fanfic that crowbars every character it can think of into the plot for no reason.
• Continuity Lockout: Never read the manga? Then the significance of Hanasaki dressed as Zombire will be lost to you.
• Demonic Spiders: Any of the former Ritual Monsters, like Hungry Burger or Fortress Whale, can turn into enormous headaches because they are summoned normally like any other monster, and their Divine Attribute means they have no vulnerability to the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanic. The player will need to beat them in a straight battle — something that's very difficult due to the slow progress of Deck Capacity and Duelist Level — or use Removal to take care of them. The most damning part is that they have a Deck Cost of 999, so even if the player wins them they are highly unlikely to use those monsters for themselves, ever.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • When you board the Duel Express, the game's difficulty starts to rise, especially since it's the first time you're forced to feel the full brunt of your LP carrying over between duels.
  • Once you hit Canada the already difficult game becomes very hard, as enemies have cards much stronger than yours and there aren't fast ways to level grind and keep up.
  • The game’s difficulty is upped again when Slifer the Sky Dragon is turned back to stone, as you can't use Slifer for some time.
  • By the time you've beaten Marik, who's already a tough fight, opponents that come after him begin to break the rules, having more starting LP than you and use multiple copies of game-breaking cards. You're also forced to backtrack to rematch several old opponents and they also have a tuned-up deck and start blatantly cheating.
• Escapist Character: Your character. He gets to hang out with Yugi and Joey, save the world, and even beat Kaiba in a duel! You own six of seven Millennium Items and all three Egyptian God Cards, and if you're lucky, even The Winged Dragon of Ra in Phoenix Mode. You're the coolest character in the world.
• Evil Is Cool: Pegasus, who sports a ponytail and a golden eyepatch and stays one step ahead of everyone for a majority of the game.
• Game-Breaker: Due to similar mechanics, almost every game breaker listed in The Sacred Cards also applies, even if some of them have been restricted to only 1 or 2 copies per deck or have had their deck costs inflated. On the other hand, you're probably going to need them to beat opponents with cards far stronger than yours.
  • Monster-destroying effects are even more vital to help you overcome the advantage the opponent has. Nothing except the God Cards have protection against them, so you can easily turn the tables after the opponent has spent resources on their strongest monster.
  • The Winged Dragon of Ra's Phoenix Mode can be discarded in the hand to immediately appear on the field in Battle Mode, negating the need for three tributes. ^note It doesn't necessarily guarantee a win, though, if your opponent can lower its Attack/Defense Points with Effect Cards or Umi.
  • Dark Flare Knight can similarly be discarded from the hand to immediately summon Mirage Knight to the field, a 2800/2000 monster that normally needs two tributes. Mirage Knight then splits into a Dark Magician and a Flame Swordsman on the opponent's next turn, giving you two powerful beatsticks. Provided you can afford it in terms of money and deck capacity, there is no reason to not run Dark Flare Knight in most any deck you may end up building.
  • Castle of Dark Illusions constantly turns your monsters face-down, acting as a continuous version of Darkness Approaches. It also constantly turns the field into the Yami field which conveniently gives it a 30% power boost, creating a 3250 DEF wall with no drawback. However, its absurd deck cost makes it unlikely for a player to even run it until postgame, unless they somehow take control of an opponent's copy.
  • The Paradox boss rush has you winning specific cards from the Millennium Guardians on top of the normal duel rewards. When you leave midway, or answer Paradox's questions wrongly, you'll be returned to the start of the boss rush with your rewards intact, meaning you can keep defeating the first Guardian to get a ton of Kuribohs to wager on duels, or keep beating the third Guardian to amass Giant Soldiers of Stone for large sums of money.
• Good Bad Bugs: The game counts "discarding" as "sent to the Graveyard" for the purposes of card effects, which means a lot of monsters that were intended to have their effects activate upon being destroyed can instead be discarded to activate their effects instantly. Vampire Lord, Dark Flare Knight, and Ra Phoenix Mode are the most famous.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: When Tristan is seemingly turned into a robot monkey again, Mokuba mentions that KaibaCorp had once manufactured robot monkeys that could duel, but they didn't sell well. Not long after this game's release, GX introduced a cybernetic monkey created by KaibaCorp that knew how to duel.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The Chevaliers, green lizard-like creatures with Pegasus's original hair. They ambush you in a locked, otherwise empty cable car.
  • The image of Pegasus in the opening and ending.
  • The theme for Pegasus's castle.
• Nintendo Hard: This is perhaps one of the hardest Yu-Gi-Oh video games out there. Opponents have much stronger monsters than yours, even starting each duel with a Field effect in place that suits their specialty, and begin to blatantly cheat in the endgame. On your end, it takes a lot of Level Grinding to increase your duelist level so you can use better cards, the money you win is pitiful so you'll rarely be able to afford to buy any new cards thus relying on spoils of duels, and your opening deck flat sucks. And then in the late game, opponents have more than 8,000 Life Points, and you're subjected to Boss Rushes. In this game your Life Points don't reset after a duel, you need to visit a PC to recharge them, and thus in said Boss Rushes you need to complete them using 8,000 Life Points for all opponents. The above Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors strategy? You need to do this, because if you try to take a late-game opponent on in a proper duel without doing it, you will get crushed.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Besides all the computer cheating and loading issues, the game's Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors system can easily be turned against you, like killing a Blue-Eyes with a Kuriboh.
  • You're forbidden from selling or anteing a card unless you have at least two copies of it in your card trunk. While this was done to try and stop Unintentionally Unwinnable scenarios where the player has no cards to ante and no money to buy more, in practice it'll often mean you win high-level cards you won't be able to use for a long while and may not even want to use anyway, and you have to let them sit in your trunk for a long time instead of being allowed to sell them to buy other cards or anteing them to win stronger cards.
  • The game automatically scans the field looking for continuous effect monsters during every phase of battle and after every action (placing a card, attacking, ending a card's battle phase, ending your turn, etc.). This is not that a big deal until it actually finds a continuous effect monster, at which point it will proceed to read the monster's effect every single time it is scanned. This means the game will read the card's effect a bare minimum of twice per turn, usually much more, and can absolutely bring the game to a screeching halt. A lot of players avoid placing helpful monsters like Mammoth Graveyard in their deck because they don't want to deal with this mechanic.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: The Sacred Cards was pretty easy. There were a few spikes of difficulty and the end bosses could be tough, but overall it wasn't much challenge. This game on the other hand is as Nintendo Hard as any of the old NES games.
• That One Attack:
  • That One Trap, Torrential Tribute, which destroys all non-Egyptian God monsters on the attacking side. Late-game duelists have three of them.
  • There's also That One Spell, Raigeki, which also destroys all monsters on the opposing team. There's an Anti-Raigeki card to counter it, but the odds of you having one out are slim, thanks to...
  • Harpie's Feather Duster, which removes all traps and spells from the opponent's field. It's not just Mai that has them, either.
  • Swords of Revealing Light leaves you unable to attack for 3 turns, letting the opponent easily set up on you. And unlike its counterpart in the original card game, there is no way to break the lock early.
  • Cards that inflict effect damage lets the opponent take pot shots at your LP that you can't prevent, and they are extremely painful if you've been worn down by multiple back-to-back opponents and these effects take out what's left of your LP.
    • Reflect Bounder, used by Espa Roba, inflicts damage to you equal to the ATK of your strongest monster. Your God Cards cannot prevent this effect, so Espa can take out a big chunk of your LP without warning.
    • Reshef has the God Cards as well. Obelisk can deal 4000 damage to take you out in the middle of the final fight with it. Ra's Point-to-Point transfer is lethal at almost any point in the fight due to Reshef's 40,000 LP start.
• That One Boss:
  • Mai. Her non-tribute monsters have 1850 ATK or less and most of them can take advantage of the Mountain field. Also, she can power up her Harpie Lady cards by using Cyber Shield and Electro-Whip. If that wasn't bad enough, her Harpie's Pet Dragon can be powered up by every Harpie-related card on the field. Also, Mai can use Elegant Egotist to transform a Harpie Lady into Harpie Lady Sisters.
  • Weevil, for one simple reason — Perfectly Ultimate Great Moth. 3500 ATK, and his Forest field powers it up 30%. If he manages to keep Petit Moth or Cocoon or Evolution in play for only a turn or two, you'll find yourself facing one of the strongest monsters in the game fighting on its home turf. Good luck. He can also use Pinch Hopper to summon any insect from his hand. Also, he’s the first duelist that ignores the card restrictions.
  • Arkana. He not only runs high-powered monsters, in the 1400+ range, with a variety of attributes, but he has the Yami field to give all of them 30% power bonuses and several power-up cards for them too, letting him quickly blast apart your Life Points with only a turn or two of leeway if you can't get an advantage on him.
  • Marik. He runs high-powered monsters in a variety of attributes, so it's pretty much impossible to stack your deck with opposing-attribute monsters like many other opponents. He'll use Newdoria, Widespread Ruin, and Raigeki to destroy your monsters, Viser Des and Spellbinding Circle to sap their power, Swords of Revealing Light to stop them from attacking, and then out comes Monster Reborn to revive them for his own usage. Oh, and he'll heal himself with Soul of the Pure.
  • Odion is an optional boss faced before Marik, but he's no slouch either. He runs a lot of Traps, so when you attack there's no telling what's coming, but odds are it's going to destroy whatever you attacked with or at least stop its attack. He also runs three Swords of Revealing Light, three Monster Reborn, several field-clearing cards like Heavy Storm, Raigeki, and Dark Hole, and finally he has several powerful tribute monsters, including the Divine-attribute Tri-Horned Dragon.
  • Simon Muran/Paradox. He runs monsters with upwards of 1600 points in most every attribute in the game, making it impossible to reliably counter him via Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. Further, he has several tribute monsters that are Divine-attribute, completely immune to that strategy anyway. Simon only runs three Spell and Trap cards, unlike other duelists up to that point. This means his deck is almost entirely composed of monster cards, hence he'll be able to summon those high-powered monsters every single turn with no let-up. If you manage to summon a good monster against him, you still aren't safe, because he has Reflect Bounder to deal damage to you equal to your monster's ATK. Finally, he's fought at the end of the Millennium Guardian Boss Rush, so you probably aren't in the best of shape in the first place.
  • The Final Boss Reshef The Dark Being is one of the hardest fights in any Yu-Gi-Oh game. His 4-Star monsters have 1900 attack points on average, and gain a 30% boost from the Yami field. Reshef also has 3 copies of Castle of Dark Illusions, with both its anime DEF value of 2500 and its anime effect of creating the Yami field every turn it's out, in case you thought it'd be simple to counter his field with a different one. Worse is Reshef's tribute monsters are the same Egyptian God Cards you spent the whole game assembling to beat him with, and he has multiple copies of Pot of Greed, Swords of Revealing Light, and Change of Heart to summon them faster. Facing Slifer or Obelisk is bad enough, but the worst-case scenario is what happens if he summons Ra; Reshef will use Ra's effect to One-Hit Kill you if he has a great enough life point lead, and he starts the duel with 40,000 life points compared to your maximum 8000. And he comes after the boss fight with Sol Chevalsky as well, so if you lose to him you have to beat Sol to get back to Reshef without saving. And on top of all this madness, Reshef can see your hand.
• Unexpected Character: Bandit Keith being the leader of the Neo Ghouls, as he disappeared midway through The Sacred Cards and vanished outright in the anime. The manual reveals the twist right away, but in the game itself it's more of a shock.

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